David Cameron’s Own Scandal

Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World—and the former spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron—has been arrested; so has the paper’s former royal editor, Clive Goodman. (“Royal editor” refers to his beat, not his prerogatives.) The paper they worked for is a former one, too; on Thursday, one hundred and sixty-seven years and nine months after the News of the World first went on sale in London, for three pence and full, even then, of crime-and-gossip reports, the Murdoch family shut it down. What did it in? The short answer is charges of phone-hacking and bribing the police; but there are other factors that pushed this story beyond the usual realm of tabloid heartlessness, in which the paper had dwelt successfully since 1843: the character of its victims; the identity of its political allies; and its proprietor’s other business and personal concerns. (See Ken Auletta and Lauren Collins for more on that.)

But one should be wary of the response to the News of the World scandal, especially in terms of how it affects press freedoms going forward. David Cameron announced two inquiries Friday, including one that

should look at how our newspapers are regulated and make recommendations for the future…it should be truly independent…independent of the press, so the public will know that newspapers will never again be solely responsible for policing themselves.

Did self-policing fail, and, if so, on whose part? It looks from here like the Guardian, another newspaper, did the tireless investigative work that exposed the News of the World’s practices, while public officials at every level were intimately involved in them. If the Guardian did the work that the government failed to do, is the lesson there really that the press should have less power, and the government more? British newspapers are not “solely responsible for policing themselves”: the News of the World engaged in activities that are criminal under existing laws, and that those who enforce laws were well positioned to reveal and put an end to. They did not. The list of the complicit starts with the first policeman who was offered money, but it extends to David Cameron.

One shocking aspect of the News of the World scandal is the way that it had, for some time, been in plain view. It’s been known for years that the News of the World hacked into the voicemail messages of people like Sienna Miller, the actress, and of aides to Prince William (this is actually Goodman’s second arrest). This week, though, the Guardian reported that, in 2002, the tabloid had also hacked into the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a thirteen-year-old girl who was then missing, and deleted some of her voicemails when the message box filled up. This made her parents think she might be alive. She was not. Dowler had been murdered by a serial killer, Levi Bellfield, who had not been caught. How could the News of the World know that it wasn’t deleting a message that might prove to be a clue? Here are the stakes: in the two years after Dowler’s death, Bellfield went on to murder two other women, one twenty years old, and one who was twenty-two.

Another revelation, also reported by the Guardian, was that the News of the World may have hacked into the phones of the relatives of dead soldiers. What was it looking for? One doubts it was insight into the politics of Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Still, this scandal is, above all, a political one. In 2003, Rebekah Brooks, then called Rebekah Wade (she’s been married since) and the editor of the News of the World, told a parliamentary subcommittee that “We have paid the police and—for information in the past,” on its face an illegal act. She has since said that she meant it as a royal-editor “we,” encompassing the whole of the British press; the video below (via the Lede) doesn’t bear that out. Asked whether the paper would pay off policemen in the future, Brooks shrugs; she seems startled less by the suggestion that she would break the law, then by the idea that anyone could know what she would do next. When Brooks begins to say, “it depends on…” Coulson, who is sitting next to her—and would become editor, after Rupert Murdoch promoted Brooks—interrupts, and mutters something about how, whatever the paper did, it did “within the law”:

Four years later, just after Coulson had to resign in the first round of phone-hacking allegations, he was hired as the Conservative Party’s communications director. Did Cameron wonder how someone who might be complicit in bribing public officials would serve in a political office? Paying off an ordinary policeman seems to have been something Coulson accepted or condoned; were ministers out of bounds? If he had been willing to pay bribes, would he also be willing to take them, or to look away when a colleague did?

As Lauren Collins notes, Cameron’s social circle and that of Brooks and other News Corp. executives intersected. It is in these settings that deals can be made and regulations (like the ones that could stand in the way of Murdoch’s acquisition of all of BSkyB) are set aside. A more muffled press will not help to disrupt that intimacy. Cameron, in his statement, made gestures toward the need for a free press, but mostly spoke as if his own fault lay with not being strict enough with journalists:

Because party leaders were so keen to win the support of newspapers, we turned a blind eye to the need to sort this issue, get on top of the bad practices, to change the way our newspapers are regulated.

But, really, it’s the other way around. Reporters need more freedom to be strict with Cameron and his colleagues. The question now is whether those most responsible for the News of the World scandal will use it to further damage the British press.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.